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Ballerina, the programming language for geeks, architects, marketers and rest

We@ WSO2 thrilled to announce our latest innovation at the WSO2ConUSA 2017. It is a programming language for all. It is for geeks who like to write scripts for everything they do, for architects who barely speaks without diagrams, for marketing folks who has no idea what programming is and for so called programmers who cracks any kind of programming language you throw at them. Simply put it is a programming language with visual and textual representation. You can try out live samples at ballerinalang web site.
Programming language inventions are not something we see so often. The reason is that, when people are happy with a language and get used to it, they are reluctant to move from that eco system. Unless it is super awesome and can’t live without it, they prefer holding their position. This is even harder for general purpose programming languages than Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).
Integration of systems has been a tedious task from the beginning and nothing much has changed even today. While working with our customers, we identified that there is a gap in the integration space where programmers and architects speaks in different languages and sometimes this resulted in huge losses of time and money. Integration has lot to do with diagrams. Top level people always prefer diagrams than code but programmers do the other way around. We thought of filling this gap with a more modernized programming language. That was our starting point.
Once we started the development and while doing the design of this programming language, we identified that there are so many cool features spread across different programming languages but there is no one programming language with all the cool features. Then we made design changes to make ballerina a more general purpose language than a DSL.
Today, we are happy to announce the “Flexible, Powerful, Beautiful” programming language “Ballerina”. Here are the main features of the language in a short list.
  • Textual, Visual and Swagger representation of your code
  • Parallel programming made easier with workers and fork-join
  • XML, JSON and DataTable as built in data types for easier data handling
  • Packaging and module system to write, share, distribute code in elegant fashion
  • Composer (editor) makes it easier to write programs in a more visual manner
  • Built in debugger and test framework (testerina) makes it easier to develop and test
Tryout ballerina and let us know your thoughts on medium, twitter, facebook, slack, google and many other channels. We are happy to hear from you make integration great again.
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